The snowball effect of organic search marketing works like this: The higher your hotel’s website ranks in search engines for relevant phrases, the more people will find you.  These people include prospective guests, reviewers, and journalists.  The more people find you, the more coverage and attention you’ll receive on other websites.   This in turn brings you even more links and a higher search ranking.

Once started, search optimization is a virtuous cycle providing long-term benefits to your hotel.

Still not convinced of the benefits of natural search marketing?  Here’s a few more reasons you need to start now:

1) It’s affordable.  You may choose to hire a specialist to optimize your website, but you won’t pay an ongoing monthly expenditure for advertising.

2) There’s no risk.  With other forms of promotion, you could make a wrong decision and find out (months later) that you’ve wasted thousands of dollars.  This doesn’t happen when you invest in search engine optimization (SEO).  Making the proper adjustments now will benefit you for years to come.

3) It provides the best quality of prospective guests – more than any other marketing or advertising medium.  People will come to your website are actively looking for you and what you have to provide.  Since the visit is guest-initiated, they will be more engaged with the message on your hotel website.

Industry studies show that search engines account for the large majority of traffic to most hotel websites.  Of course, this is hardly surprising.  Search engines are the most popular way for internet users to find information.

With this in mind, how can you position your hotel to capture a larger share of search engine traffic?  There are two broad approaches to search engine marketing (SEM), which I’ll explain in this post.

1. Natural (Organic) Optimization

All search engines will include your hotel website somewhere in their results pages – it’s just a question of how far from the top.  The natural approach to ranking high involves optimizing your website, and getting other popular sites to link to you.

The advantages of organic optimization:

• Getting visitors from natural searches is totally free for you
• The people coming from search engines will be actively looking for you
• A higher placement conveys authority for the term searched for

The disadvantages of organic optimization:

• It can take a while to reach the top for your core keywords
• In some markets, the competition can be very intense (lengthening this time even more)

2. Paid Placement

It is possible to pay to appear in search engine result pages.  Usually, this is accomplished by using pay-per-click services such as Google AdWords.

The advantages of paid placement:

• It’s possible to instantly appear at the top of search results
• It can potentially be a very cost-effective way to attract guests (usually under $1 for each visitor)
• The ability to measure campaign success (more than any other advertising medium)

The disadvantages of paid placement:

• Your campaign can cost a relatively large amount (depending on the strategy you use)
• Ongoing management of your campaign is needed

In future posts, I’ll discuss in greater detail how to design and launch a campaign using both of these types of search engine marketing.  Stay tuned!

Let me ask you this: Which search marketing strategy does your hotel focus on?